threegee

Maggie is right, up front there is ex deputy Labour leader Roy Hattersley. With him is presumably his wife (Edith aka Molly) who he divorced this April shortly before he remarried. So yes, he's still going strong at 81! A couple of trade unionists I half-recognise, particularly the old short guy in the black jacket and glasses on camera left. Going to need to research those - you know how well I relate to trade unionists!

LOL I was intending to take this temporary thread down, but now you'll scream censorship! Re-titled it.

http://www.bedlington.co.uk/news/_/news/breaking-news-r178

You can't hurry a White Christmas. Next you'll be asking for Bing Crosby!

Sounds like he may have knocked the Luxury out of "Bedlington Luxury Coaches".

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/matt/

I heard a rumour that they are going to scrap that Prestel clone and get the Internet real soon - mais non?

Brilliant! And, judging by the coats and scarves, it certainly wasn't the Summer of 1972 either.

Ah, so it is in that shot! Good find! What would be of far more general use it to know exactly when the (dangerous) concrete lampposts went. This has general implications for dating many Gallery photos.

Late 60's I'd guess, but it may have been 1970's. Can anyone make it out from this shot? http://www.bedlington.co.uk/community/gallery/image/1643-front-street-1970/ It was certainly on the little central island in the mid to late 50's. This one looks early 1960's to me: http://www.bedlington.co.uk/community/gallery/image/1573-the-lion/ Should have paid more attention myself! The Gallery will surely give more clues.

So old Rupy thinks Tony has been behaving less than honourably with his Chinese wife? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/tony-blair/10470792/Rupert-Murdoch-in-rift-with-Tony-Blair-over-claims-of-multiple-encounters-with-ex-wife-Wendi-Deng.html Another WMD crisis then Tone? (Wendi Murdoch Divorce). You really couldn't make any of this up!

Try this one (it's quick), and please report back here to other members, particularly if you save significant money: www.energyhelpline.com Know a better price comparison website that covers suppliers in our area? Then don't keep it to yourself!

Sorry to be a tad pedantic but it was Friday 22nd November. If you have a problem editing the title I can do it for you - just PM me. I was at Glendale or Avondale, Kity Brewster when someone opened the door to me quite stony-faced saying they'd just heard he'd been shot, but I think that a couple of people at East Hartford confirmed that it was fatal about half an hour later. Not sure precisely what I was thinking between the two; I've a feeling of being confused and upset going along past Horton Church.

If Miliband or Balls had a scrap of evidence of overcharges they'd produce it. They don't because they can't! It's far easier to use the usual "politics of envy" ploy that Labour always uses - you know, tax cuts for millionaires and all that crap - than tell the truth and put up a reasoned argument. In fact the regulator is doing his job, and although more real competition is needed, the market is reasonably fair to customers considering the degree of political meddling. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/9878281/Ofgem-boss-warns-of-higher-energy-prices-in-supply-roller-coaster.html If Labour hadn't messed on for so long changing its mind on nuclear and back again to suit various factions in the party we'd have some relief coming up over the next few years. Now it's going to take a whole ten years to get some decent nuclear capacity. Granted the coalition could have been a lot quicker, but by the time they got elected suppliers were hard to find and they were over a barrel on pricing. Only 6.5 out of 10 for the Con/Lab actions so far though. You can't simply say that spot prices this year have only gone up < 2% because suppliers hedge often by negotiating years in advance, and contracts end. There are many other factors in getting energy to your door too; networking and infrastructure costs represent quite a large proportion of them. If there were distribution failures then politicians would be screaming "underinvestment". What we have though is very tight supply due to lack of proper energy policy over the last decade or more. It's often necessary to take/make expensive supplies just to keep the wheels turning. More capacity will come but it will take time, though if Miliband has his daft way in capping prices this will only have the opposite effect long-term. Less capacity will inevitably be built and we'll be back in Labour's la-la world where people work without any incentive, yet his vote-buying give away will be still be recovered after the cap ends. One thing we will readily agree about is that coal fired stations should not have been shut down when they were. And there you get back to the green lunacy, which is the reason for most of the current pain.

Many thanks to fourgee for tonight's work on upgrading the software. There are many improvements and fixes, but you'll mainly notice this in the Gallery software which has had a major revamp. Amongst other things the geo-tagging now works properly. So, given half a chance, cameras and smartphones that have GPS should flag the location of your shot on the map. He put in a lot of work fixing problems that had gone unnoticed (like bitmap photos being uploaded with a .jpg file extension!) so it was more than a simple upgrade. You may also find some photos that weren't displaying before, due to a null category being selected for them at upload time. All member's suggestions for reorganising the Gallery will be carefully considered. Our regular posters will appreciate the fixes to annoying bugs in the text editor. Please report any other problems you spot and we will have them attended to.

The person who played politics with their jobs was communist, Arthur Scargill; the Tory government never picked a fight with the mining unions he came looking for one. Indeed he wanted to overthrow a democratically elected government. If that's not playing politics I don't know what is! Anyway what it's about is the results of their polling which says that public concern about energy prices is uppermost of people's minds. Labour too of course, with Miliband's offer to spend other people's money on "freezing" energy bills for 20 months. A relief that anyone with half a brain knows will be clawed back with interest, and which will only stifle much needed investment in new capacity and reduce competition. The real villain on energy prices is the green levies, which Miliband's own crop of dippy tree-huggers fully support, and so won't speak against. Blaming greedy energy companies is just a smokescreen; he knows as well as anybody that it's market forces (helped along by daft politics).

As you say those are not the original gates. The originals succumbed to high winds and were eventually way beyond repair. The "new" ones weren't made of the same stuff and the uprights rotted; that's why they were boxed. Your Grandpa should have been around to service them!

Maybe I should have titled this post "Whatever happened to The Big Society?" http://www.conservat...ciety_plan.aspx Goodness, it was all there a few days ago! Full story at Computer Weekly: http://www.computerw...internet-h.html Cam is the man who wants us to believe that this time around he will keep his promise for a referendum on the EU in 2015, and that we can trust him to renegotiate our membership. Promise, what promise? Referendum, what referendum? Don't remember that; do you Nick?

https://maps.google....001066&t=h&z=20 ... I think! "collapsing" ? Yes, there are lies, damn lies, and council planner's statements/planning applications; had some!

So what does everyone think of the HS2 project? An organ for growth or just a huge waste of money that, even if we have it, could be better spent elsewhere? We'll set up a poll after full discussion; I suspect most people are like me and quite undecided. Oops... almost forgot to post a link to the counter-case: http://stophs2.org/

To the contrary Swan's had rather good management - they underbid to get the contract in the full knowledge that the men from the ministry were clueless and the company could milk the contract for years. This they did in the full knowledge that there was no more profitable commercial work available, and that the best they could make of the situation was to keep things ticking over (and the core workforce employed) until something turned up, or market conditions changed. I was talking about North east shipbuilding in general, not just on the Tyne, and not just in recent history. We've even priced ourselves out of ship-breaking these days! Loads of industries are growing and the UK is up there with the best, if not leading the pack. I've put little bits of my pension in quite a few (full list available on request ). Just one would be http://www.iqep.com/ which - amongst other things - now has by far the most efficient photovoltaic cells in the world. I've backed them with probably far more than I can afford to for a decade now. Pity they are based in Wales and not the NE! Ah, "flooded with new unneeded equipment and deemed unprofitable". Isn't that what state planning does; invests in all the wrong things at all the wrong times, because it's the politically correct thing to do and buys votes? Politicians are like generals: always fighting the last war (with someone else's money).

I wonder what government oversaw the demise of our shipbuilding industry in the North East, the final chapter of which played out in 2006? Can you blame Labour for this? Of course not, it was entirely down to market forces. If Nationalisation is the solution to all our problems then please name one single industry that grew during the period it was nationalised? Just one? All the industries you mention grew through private enterprise, providing more and more jobs, then shrank during the period they were nationalised. The reason is easy to understand: they became bloated; had second-rate civil servants running them; weren't properly financially accountable to the stake holders (the taxpayer), so just kept on putting their hands out for more taxpayer money to build an even bigger empire, producing goods eventually no-one (not even other state industries) wanted to buy. Labour eventually got the message but the Soviets and Chinese probably beat them to it. It's no coincidence that the steady rise in Russian and Chinese economic power dates exactly from their embracing market forces rather than trying vainly to pretend that the state knows best. The state is a voracious consumer, and just about everything it feeds on is produced or was built by private effort. It exists because others make profits - you know, that dirty word that trade unionists spit before uttering. Profit is good because it means you are doing something well. If you can't make a profit that means that it's probably not worth doing because you are going about it in the wrong way. It also signals to others that here's real demand that you too could be meeting, and so promotes competition, even better was of doing things, and lower prices. The Market is the sum total of the people who buy whatever you have to offer think about what you offer. The Market is not how anyone feels things should or must be, it's how things are in the real world; it's people voting with their own money, not someone else's money! Even nationalised industries pretend to address market forces, and aspire to make a profit. But, they rarely do so because it's so much easier to promise jam tomorrow, and put your hand out for another large wodge of someone else's profit! There has to be what the economists call "moral hazard" for people to get off their backsides; lack of moral hazard is why nationalised industries (and other socialist ideas) always fail.

England shafted once again by our politicos! All the economic indications are that the Clyde shipyards are unviable, and BAE had obviously already decided that. But... blatantly obvious behind-the-scenes political interference dictates that 500 years of shipbuilding at Portsmouth has to end to buy the Scottish Independence Referendum! If Scotland thinks it can do better without us then let them get on with it; it would be a great day for the rest of the UK if greedy Salmond were to get his stupid way. He doesn't want UK military bases, so why should he have the industrial benefits of UK defence? If he wants his hands on those declining oil revenues, then how about paying the UK taxpayer back the billions they sunk into the rescue of Scottish banks? Shame on you Tory, LD and Labour schemers - you don't deserve a single vote between the lot of you!

Here's another sub-plot: Amazingly the printers of that volume are still in business http://www.butlertanneranddennis.com/heritage/ Although their potted history seems to have forgotten to mention the little local difficulty in 2008, when the business had to be rescued amid some very dodgy goings on: http://www.thisissomerset.co.uk/Butler-Tanner-bosses-banned-print-industry-440/story-18080607-detail/story.html#axzz2jih8vvrn I fail to see why people need to read/write fiction, when fact generally takes you in so many unexpected directions.